Books

Please find a Call for Papers…
Call for papers for book:

Sexing Travel: Intimacy and Subjectivity in Women’s International Tourism

Edited by Susan Frohlick and Jessica Jacobs

Abstracts accepted until January 15, 2008
Full chapters due by July 1, 2008
2009 publication target date

We are seeking ethnographically informed papers that focus on the multiple dimensions of women’s participation in sexual and intimate relationships with local men or women in international tourist destinations, to be included in an edited volume on transnational/cultural intimacy and sexual subjectivity in women’s travel. We are currently looking into various channels for publication, and are aiming for eight contributors.

Scholarship on ‘ethno-sexual relations’ (Nagel, 2003) between tourists and locals is growing and reflects, in our view, the expansion of sex tourism in late capitalism from a predominantly masculine terrain (tied into ideas around the modern subject) and historical practice to a global phenomenon that includes the gendered consumption practices of First World women shaped by some women’s increasing economic power and mobility. Most work to date draws almost exclusively upon a political-economic framework that refers to “female sex tourists” or “romance tourists”, whose parameters are defined by women’s similarity (or difference) to male sex tourists. As well as sustaining the male subject at the center of the conceptualization of female sex tourism, we feel these approaches ignore the complex sensorial and emotional dimensions of women’s inter-racial, transcultural sexual and intimate relationships with local people in largely Southern and Third World countries. They also miss the opportunity to comment on the role these encounters play in new subject formations and transnational relationships.

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Please circulate to related lists. Many thanks.

Call for Papers

Challenging Cultures of Death

Aim:  A cross-cultural dialogue imagining a political and symbolic world based on life not death: mercy not sacrifice.

Julia Kristeva has claimed that we live under a sacrificial social contract. In the light of this claim, our current history, and the political developments that have brought our world to a state of permanent war and to the brink of nuclear disaster, cultural theorists from many disciplines are asking the question: how do we challenge the mechanisms whereby we appear constantly to achieve our identities at the expense of Others?  

The language of sacrifice and martyrdom, international and ecumenical, permeates religious and political discourse and has been culturally elaborated in countless ways. Some theorists argue that the totem secret of our societies is that we periodically send out our young to die, thereby replenishing our political identities. The Reformers and Counter-Reformers challenged sacrifice, but now the sacrifice to end all sacrifices manifests as the war to end all wars.  

However, the great religious prophets - radical cultural critics - insistently cried for mercy not sacrifice. Such prophets did not foretell, but imagined and ensured a better future for all of life. Standing in that tradition, and from the depths of their own embodiment, and experience as Outsiders , cultural theorists seek to forge new symbols, theoretical resources, and disciplinary, spiritual, and artistic practices based on life and mercy rather than on sacrifice and death.

The first in a proposed series, this interdisciplinary event seeks to identify and welcome theoretical, artistic, and other proposals that serve this overall aim.

Venue: Trinity College Dublin

Date: Fri 2nd Sat 3^rd Sun 4 ^th Nov 07

Sponsors

Institute for Feminism and Religion

Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin.   

Keynote Speakers (to date)

Bracha L. Ettinger, Griselda Pollock, Anne Primavesi, Genevieve Vaughan. (See below for biographies, bibliographies, and current positions).

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For those of you who are interested in critical evaluation and critical analysis!

Earlier this week I announced on my baptistnomad site that my colleague-friend Jody Raphael had given notice that the book had been published. This is the third and final in a series exploring violence against women. Below are the press releases that you might find helpful. Originally PDFs, I converted them into JPEGs so that I could post them here. Enjoy!

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss, eds. The Early Frankfurt School and Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. x + 263 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-3557-1.

Reviewed for H-German by Emily J. Levine, History Department, Stanford University.

Dialectics of Enlightenment

This volume is the outcome of a growing academic interest in the relationship between religion and Enlightenment broadly conceived. Just as recent works have rewritten religion back into the Enlightenment narrative so, too, this volume reminds us that critical theory was not entirely hostile to religion as was once thought.[1] As Kohlenbach and Geuss explain in their introduction, critical theory was first introduced to the West in the postwar period by the neo-Marxist student movement of the 1960s. Attracted to critical theory because of its claim to link social theory and political practice, the student movement nonetheless simply ignored or suppressed any anti-liberal features of the philosophy that did not fit their own philosophy. This attitude extended to any affinities between critical theory and religious traditions. If the Left adopted a secularized form of critical theory for its political purposes, then the theological camp, for its part, exaggerated the existential concerns of critical theory as justification for its own arguments against the privatization of religion and failed to “realise that for Critical Theory religion represented first and foremost a _problem_, even on those rare occasions when it seemed to be presented as a solution” (emphasis in original, p. 2). Read the rest of this entry »

I have completed the first part of Trinh Minh-ha’s text, Woman, Native Other. The first two sections contained the conceptual framework for woman/women, language, writing, nativism, and science. Largely an anthropological perspective, this text begins to broaden the interdisciplinary purview of women’s history and the history of displacement. While I found these two chapters quite dense, there is a lively pulse to Minh-ha’s text. The narrative that is being written is also writing both the author and reader. Displacement is inevitable; however, I get the sense that the displacement is both the displacement of the native, woman, women, oppressed and the displacement of the one who has been managed by rationality, the masculine symbolic, and Father Culture.

In Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box, echoes of French Feminist Theory [namely Kristeva and Cixous] are very present and help to buttress Minh-ha’s writing/feminine writing/woman writing. This chapter reveals the undercurrents [yes, she points to several] that oppress women’s ability to write: rationality, male dominance, and Father Culture are some to name. The following chapter on the Language of Nativism continues to unmask the binds of oppressions by considering the act and function of language. No longer can language be something that is passive; for Minh-ha, language is a birthing process, free from male/masculine rationality.

Writing is an act of envelopment; it is an act of labor and birth.

I have begun the reading of Minh-ha’s text, and is the first book by Minh-ha that I have read.  This text is listed in cultural and feminist studies and powerfully is “situated” at the intersections of a number of different fields/disciplines.  I’m guessing this text will continue to help me understand migration and violence and the role of boundaries, conversion and displacement.

“In the first full-length study of Post-Feminism, Trinh-Minh-ha examines post-colonial processes of displacement–cultural hybridization and decentered realities, fragmented selves and multiple identities, marginal voices and languages of rupture.  Working at the intersection of several fields–women’s studies, anthropology critical cultural studies, literary criticism, and feminist theory, she juxtaposes numerous prevailing contemporary discourses in a form that questions the [male-is-norm] literary and theoretical establishment.  She incorporates the poetic in the analytic and stays away from the old way of theorizing through systematic dissection, combination, and recapitulation.  Trinh discusses questions of language and writing in relation to the notions of ethnicity and femininity; of identity, authenticity, and difference; of commitment as to the function and role of the woman writer; and of storytelling as a continuing setting into motion of a feminist problematic in the context of a female living tradition.”  [from the back cover]